It looks like I’ve been rude, but I actually responded to Daniel via email!

Here’s what I wrote:

Hey Daniel,

Thank you so much for the feedback, and sorry about the mistakes.

I missed that it’s nutrir, not nutrar, so I ended up with incorrect conjugation.

In 27, yep, I meant breathable air, so I’ll fix that one up.

And on 7 down, I made a simple error thinking a Cuban puro, the cigar, was spelt purro. Looks like I’ll have to rewrite that clue entirely.

As for your questions:
– “face” to mean the first letter seems very standard to me. I’ve also seen “faceless” to mean dropping the first letter.
– “series” as the hidden word indicator seems very standard to me as well. I don’t think I would have ever been surprised by “series”.

But definitely add those comments to the blog post. More comments are good.

There should definitely be an indicator equivalent of the crossword abbreviations. I might start up one of those pages (not soon, though, I’m off to East Timor and beyond tonight and won’t be back home until April).

What would be even handier would be the same crossword abbreviations page for Spanish. As I’m not a native Spanish speaker, I’m not aware of the standard abbreviations, and unfortunately I couldn’t find anything definitive on the web for all the abbreviations that must also exist in Spanish. It was one thing that really would have come in handy when writing those clues, especially because they’re so handy when writing the clues in English.

I’ve never done an Araucaria crossword, but I’ve certainly heard of him, and I’ve certainly heard of him in contrast to the Ximenes style of crosswords. DA is definitely a little bit freer with the rules, like Araucaria.